newbie vmware 5.0.0 question

[ukblack]

Hello, I am trying to setup an unattend install via a boot disk in VMware, but I keep getting an error during the loading of the network drivers saying that it cannot find NIC. I have done several unattend installs with this exact configuration outside of vmware so I know the drivers are correct.

Any help would be appreciated.

[MHz]

Virtual machines use your host drivers to communicate with your hardware. Internally, the driver installation cannot detect the NIC as the VM does not use drivers internally except for the VMWare drivers, which are perhaps more like a driver wrapper, which you install after the OS is installed. If you install nVidia or ATI graphic drivers then you get the same as it will not detect your physical hardware. You need to think virtual...

[ukblack]

Thanks for the reply, but how would I incorporate the vmware drivers for the virtual nics into my boot disk.

[gosherm]

Either download them from the VMware site (I believe they are available in individual packages) or extract them from the VMware tools ISO (located at c:\program files\vmware\vmware workstation\windows.iso on my machine).

[tguy]

Hi, depending on what NIC you have installed the network boot disk may not work. If you are using the VMXnet NIC installed with the VMware tools, there is no NDIS dos driver for that NIC.

What I do is to shutdown the VM, switch the NIC configuration to use the Vlance NIC and then boot the VM with my Network Boot Disk from www.netbootdisk.com, it has the AMD PCnet driver that the Vlance NIC emulates, already installed in the driver pack and will autodiscover the NIC in the VM. Once it is loaded I can do whatever I want which is usually to backup the VM with a Ghost image. When I am done with the Ghost image, I simply switch the NIC configuration back to VMXnet and start the VM again.

Try that and see if it does not work for you.

[ukblack]

Thanks for the reply , but I got it to work after I had posted my question. I pulled pcnet drivers off amd's website and made a new ghostboot disk.

Thanks for info guys.